The Heresy of Dr Dee

death of Amy Dudley is that she was, herself, party to the disposal of the woman preventing marriage to her childhood sweetheart.’

‘There are many explanations,’ I said firmly, ‘and one is that the Spanish Ambassador is lying.’

‘A bishop of the Roman Church?’

‘As part of his campaign to win the English queen for the Spanish king – again.’

‘Well yes.’ Bonner nodded. ‘Indeed, it was my hope too that she’d see what God wanted of her and choose Philip of Spain for herself.’

‘Her sister’s widower? Was that ever truly on the cards?’

‘Was for him. And think of the benefits – we’d be back with Rome before the year’s end, and I’d be brought out of here in glory and made Archbishop of Canterbury.’

For a moment he looked almost serious and then a belch of laughter made his body rock.

‘In truth, I suppose I’ll die within these walls. Never mind.’ He took a slow sip of wine. ‘But methinks you didn’t come here to discuss the arrangements for my funeral.’

‘Or the marriage prospects of the Queen.’

‘Then what?’

I sipped some prison wine, which proved better than ours at home.

‘Wigmore Abbey,’ I said.

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the Welsh Marches. Not far from where my father was born.’

‘Ah yes. Of course it is. Or was. Is it was?’

‘So I believe.’

‘Never went there, John. Horrible journey, I hear. Best thing your father did, getting out of that wilderness, or you’d’ve been born into a life of penury and ignorance.’

He sat for some moments peering into his cup, then looked up and beamed.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s come to me, now. John Smart.’

I waited, guessing it had not come to him at all. It had ever been there, in the catacombs of his impressive mind.

‘Last Abbot of Wigmore. Got himself reported to Tom Cromwell, on a list of charges as long as my cock.’

‘What charges?’

‘As I recall… simony on a grand scale. Smart was littering the place with new- made priests. While also growing rich on the sale of abbey treasure. What a rogue the man was. Hunting and hawking with his canons. Poking maids and goodwives over quite a wide area. Ah… I see your ears are already awaggle.’

‘Abbey treasure? Gold? Plate?’

‘Doubtless.’

‘What else? Precious stones?’

Bonner frowned.

‘Methinks, before we travel further down this road, it would be as well for you to enlighten me as to our destination.’

I was hesitant. Bonner drained his cup and placed it on the board at his bedside.

‘John, I may have blood and ashes on my hands but I’m not known for breaking confidence.’

I nodded. What was there to lose? I took my wine over to the window, with its view, between bars, of the river, and told him what I knew about the shewstone of Wigmore Abbey.

* * *

I admit to being captivated by what I’d been told about this wondrous crystal with its history of miracles and healing. But talking to a cynic like Bonner could sometimes bring you sharply to your senses.

And the more I heard about the last Abbot of Wigmore, the more I wondered if he and the scryer, Brother Elias, were not, as Jack Simm had suspected, working together. Abbot Smart, an Oxford graduate, had been appointed Abbot of Wigmore by Cardinal Wolsey. Although there were rumours, Bonner said, that he’d paid for it. His rise had been rapid. In the years before the Reform he was also become suffragen Bishop of Hereford and accumulating endless money, most of it directly into his purse, by appointing over fifty candidates to Holy Orders.

‘Ho, ho,’ Bonner said. ‘What a holy knave the man was. Many attempts were made to unseat him, of course, but he always wriggled away, with the help of a small coterie of thoroughly reprehensible followers. While the abbey, both physically and morally, was rotting around him.’

‘But he escaped the dissolution with his life,’ I said.

‘And with a pension, for heaven’s sake! But then… who knows what favours he did for Lord Cromwell? A man who’d bend the law to have you hanged for stealing a spoon and sprung from a murderer’s death-cell if you were a friend he could use.’

If the shewstone was amongst his treasures, it seemed more than likely that he knew Elias and that both were well connected.

And well informed. In the right atmosphere, and with a good foundation, the power of insinuation is near limitless and may take on a life of its own. What had happened during our time in Glastonbury was surely talked about over a wide area of the west and beyond. It was not unlikely that Elias’s path had crossed with that of some fellow priest – even the garrulous Welsh vicar of Glastonbury – who had known of my passing association with Benlow the boneman. Unlikely, but not impossible.

‘You truly believe,’ Bonner said, ‘as a philosopher and a man of science, that it’s possible to achieve communion with the angelic hosts by means of a reflective stone?’

‘By means of celestial rays and the human spirit. There’s a long tradition of it.’

‘There’s a tradition of reading the future in the entrails of a chicken, John, but it still sounds like balls to me.’

‘Comes from a stimulation of the senses,’ I said. ‘Like to prayer and meditation in a church under windows of coloured glass, while the air is laden with incense. Sometimes a cloth is pulled over the head to shut out the world, so that, for the scryer, the crystal becomes luminous.’

Like to a small cathedral of light. I tried to find words to explain how attention to the light-play within the crystal might alter the workings of the mind, rendering it receptive to messages from higher spheres, and Bonner didn’t dismiss it.

‘But would you also accept,’ he said, ‘that a true mystic has no need of a scrying stone or any such tool?’

‘Of course.’ I looked over to where his rosary hung by the window. ‘But while a mystic accepts what he receives and dwells upon it—’

‘—you, as a man of science, must needs explain the process?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s how it is.’

Bonner smiled.

‘With which archangel do you seek to commune?’

‘Michael,’ I said at once.

His ancient sigil appearing in my mind, where I must have drawn it more than a hundred times in the past year, to summon courage and the powers of reason.

Which told me now to say nothing to Bonner about the Queen’s interest in communion with the supercelestial and the pressure upon me which would almost certainly resume when those deceitful mourning clothes were put away.

‘Methinks,’ he said, ‘that you imagine this stone might… awaken something in you?’

This would be the lesser of two admissions but I said nothing.

‘The great sorrow of your life,’ Bonner said, ‘is that you yourself, with all your studies and experiments, your extensive book-knowledge of ancient wisdom and cabalistic progression through the spheres are… how shall I put this…?’

‘Dead,’ I said. ‘Dead to the soul.’